Tag Archives: Frank

We’ve been doing FRANK for nearly 3 years now, which sounds like a long time, but seems like practically nothing. All sorts of exciting things have happened in those 3 years, and we’ve churned through dozens of creative, interesting, and fun menus. We were filmed for the awesome TV series The Illegal Eater which has aired around the world. And while FRANK was originally designed to be a secret…something fun you shared with only your closest foodie friends…word has apparently gotten out this month.

First, the Dallas Morning News ran an article entitled “The 100 Best Restaurants in DFW – According to Yelp” and listed us as the best restaurant in Dallas! This was a really interesting list, because Yelp is a user-driven review site. When you read a food critic’s top list, the list is certainly skewed to their specific taste…and all-too-often they have a palate that is jaded from years of eating at the most expensive and envelope-pushing restaurants. Certainly they don’t eat like you and I do. Yelp is a forum where everyday folks submit their impressions of restaurants, so you get a much more realistic idea of how good a restaurant is. We’re increasingly discovering that the majority of our diners have discovered FRANK on Yelp, and feel very humbled that we’re the ONLY “fine-dining” restaurant in Texas with a perfect 5-star rating there. Check out our Yelp reviews to see how our diners describe the experience at FRANK!

I was also excited to see several of my favorite spots on that list, including Jimmy’s Food Store (#10 on the list, absolute BEST Italian sandwiches in the area), LA Burger (#22, a Korean burger joint with delicious kimchi fries), Babe’s Chicken Dinner House (#40, a north Texas classic that I always take out-of-towners to), Hopdoddy Burger Bar (#45, breathtakingly delicious gourmet burgers, their Terlingua burger with housemade chili and fritos made me weep), Nazca Kitchen (#53, pan-Latin-American deliciousness…best yuca fries I’ve ever had by a HUGE margin), Pizza di Mia Madre (#55, a Lewisville institution that delivers fabulous pizza along with fresh-baked cookies), and at spot #93, which ain’t too shabby considering the metroplex has over 6,000 restaurants and Dallas alone has the highest restaurant-per-capita ratio in the US, is my go-to restaurant in my little hometown of Lewisville: Parma Pizza and Pasta…an unassuming family-run dive in a strip mall that lures people from downtown Dallas for its dynamite pizza, flawlessly-seared scallops picatta, and the best calzone I’ve eaten anywhere on the planet. I can’t tell you how excited I was to see it on that list!

Honestly, that accolade would be good enough for us for the entire future of FRANK, but coming right on its heels was the January “Best of the City” issue of Modern Luxury Magazine, where they reveal the top institutions in Dallas dining, bars, arts, design, etc. On the cover page for the article, they featured exactly one food image, and it was from FRANK! Chef Adrien’s flawless oyster with beet mignonette:

In the food section, they focused on 4 restaurants…Gemma and FT-33, both pricey, sophisticated New American establishments. Pecan Lodge…generally recognized as the best BBQ in North Texas. And us. ??? Our picture appears right next to Matt McCallister, the Dallas powerhouse chef who was a semifinalist for the James Beard Best Chef award this year. (That’s basically like the Oscars for chefs.)

We’re not sure what to think about it all. FRANK is just me and Jennie, and more recently Adrien, three washed-up MasterChef contestants throwing a fun dinner party and inviting a bunch of strangers. But it’s most definitely a dramatic departure from your normal restaurant experience. Often, you’re greeted by a dog when you walk through the door. You sit (VERY) snugly around a giant homemade table next to someone you’ve never met, and you eat what we’ve cooked for you in that tiny kitchen over there…there’s no ordering off a menu, and we really hope you like it because that’s all there is! But by the end of the night (usually about 3 hours after you entered), something magical has occurred. The wine has flowed and the food kept coming, and you’re talking to that stranger next to you as if he was an old friend. You’ve discovered you work in the same industry, your wives used the same florist for their wedding (who happens to be the same florist who does our flowers at FRANK), and your kids go the same college. And you’ve made plans for a double date the following weekend. And now, when you enter the FRANK lottery, you enter for 4, just like they do, hoping to increase your chances of scoring reservations again, and getting to dine with your new friends.

I can’t count the number of times this has happened. Jennie and I will be attending a local food event and come across groups of folks who met at our table and are now fast friends. Because food has this amazing power to bring people together, and most restaurants don’t facilitate this power. They simply let you enjoy a great dinner with people you already know and love, despite the fact that there are probably a dozen other people in that restaurant at that moment who might change your life if you met them.

As our last dinner drew to a close, most of the crowd had gone, but a few folks were still lingering over wine and chatting intimately, about 4 hours after the event had begun. One of them stood up and looked at me while I was doing dishes…a really sweet gal, she had attended FRANK the previous month as a solo diner and she met another solo diner who, coincidentally, lived across the street from her. They were both new to Dallas and didn’t have many friends. After meeting at FRANK, they had become dear friends and had returned as a pair the next month to dine and meet new folks. She smiled at me with tears in her eyes, and overcome with joy, she jumped up and down and shouted, “THIS…IS…SO…MUCH…FUN!”

A toast at the FRANK table. Image courtesy of Stephanie Casey at Real Fine Food

Does FRANK serve the best food in Dallas? Of course not. Do we have the vision and skill of praise-worthy Dallas chefs like Matt McCallister or John Tesar? Of course not. And while it’s truly an honor to appear on lists like this, FRANK is still a humble little sociological experiment…a dinner party of honest, homemade food, sourced as carefully as we’re able, prepared with genuine love and passion, and served by us directly to those we cooked for. It’s not something we could ever do at an actual restaurant, which is why we just laugh when people beg us to open one and even offer up financial backing. FRANK is its own unique, bizarre, delightful little thing. And our guests are as responsible for making it amazing as we are.

I’m making up for LOTS of lost time now that FRANK is on hiatus, as I haven’t blogged regularly since early summer! Things have been hectic, tons of travel, loads of cooking, and not nearly enough sleep… Most photos in this post appear courtesy of the amazing Stephanie Casey, who has a really cool blog Real Fine Food and has been fundamental in helping blitz photos of our dinners out in real-time to our fans around the globe.

For the July 4th holiday, we decided to celebrate our American food traditions at FRANK by doing a menu inspired by some classic favorites from around our country. Most folks think of America as being a culinary desert, with no real food identity to call our own, and that all our fundamental classics were borrowed from other cultures. (A statement that is actually true of MOST other cultures! The Italians borrowed their iconic pasta from the Chinese.)

But America, and in particular the South, has a very strong history of original classic dishes, and both Jennie and I grew up in stoutly Southern households, so we were ready to revisit some favorites from our childhood and improve upon some seminal dishes we never really cared for, and churn out a mouth-watering menu worthy of Independence Day. Here’s what we came up with:

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Casey

For the welcome bite, or amuse bouche, we settled on that most decidedly American invention: the humble tater tot. Who among us didn’t ingest literal TONS of tater tots in school cafeterias as a kid? The tater tot was invented in 1953 by Mormon brothers Nephi and Golden Grigg, who owned the Ore-Ida potato company. (That’s a shortened version of Oregon/Idaho Potato Growers.) They had an abundance of leftover potato scraps after turning whole potatoes into french fries, and they didn’t want to just toss them out. The ended up mixing them with binders (flour, egg, and spices) and extruded them into long tubes which were cut into little round barrel shapes and deep fried. They placed them in the frozen section of grocery stores at a really cheap price, and nobody bought them, because they thought, “Why would I spend even less on the cheapest thing anyone could ever buy…potatoes?” Just before scrapping the entire idea, the Grigg brothers put their heads together and decided to raise the price higher than french fries, and suddenly everyone wanted the BETTER version of the french fry. One of their employee’s wives actually christened the name “tater tot” and it became an iconic American institution.

FRANK's goat cheese tater tot. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Casey.

We both LOVE tater tots. Even alone, with no toppings, they are amazing. So we decided to do a FRANK spin on a tater tot, combining some local goat cheese and chives with the potato, and deep frying it to a crisp crust. When we do our end-of-meal survey, it’s fairly rare for the amuse bouche to garner more than a vote or two each night, because so many larger plates of yummy things have been paraded past our guests that they scarcely remember the little bite they had when they walked in the door. But our tater tot got LOTS of votes for best dish of the night. If they weren’t so labor intensive, I could imagine a main course of these goat cheese tater tots, topped with a poached egg, caramelized onions, bacon… *drool*

We paired this with a welcome cocktail, a hybrid between and Old Fashioned and a champagne punch, complete with a housemade maraschino cherry. Modern maraschinos are typically Rainier cherries that are first bleached to remove their color, then dyed red and sweetened. I’m not sure why ANY cherry needs to be sweetened, it’s sweet enough as it is! Our cherries were simply pitted and warmed gently in bourbon and bitters, then left to macerate for a week.

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Casey

For the opening course, it was a slam dunk. This may be my favorite thing we have EVER served at FRANK, and it was a sandwich.

That’s right. A sandwich. Typically when you dine at a fairly pricey, fixed-course restaurant, you don’t expect a sandwich. And we rarely serve them at FRANK. But when we do, they are epic. And this one was no less than epic. It started with a slice of our housemade sourdough bread, griddled in butter and bacon fat until crisp. Atop that was a leaf of butter lettuce cradling pimento cheese. If you’ve never had pimento cheese, it’s tough to describe it in an alluring way. If you’ve had it, you either love it or hate it. Traditionally, pimento cheese is just grated cheese mixed with mayonnaise and pimentos (roasted red peppers). Sounds gross…and to be honest, it is. Neither Jennie nor I like traditional pimento cheese. But there’s SO much potential there for something truly stellar. So we took 5-year aged Oregon cheddar (incredibly sharp) and folded it gently with sour cream (so much better than mayo), thinly sliced shallot, chives, pimentos, and probably a gallon of Crystal’s hot sauce, and it was a revelation. Spicy, explosively flavored, rich, and decadent. But we didn’t stop there. Then we added a slice of thick-cut, applewood smoked bacon, and then a fried green tomato…another Southern classic. The sandwich was served open faced, and most of our diners simply resorted to picking it up and eating it, rather than knifing and forking it, which was perfectly fine by us. It was like the most epic BLT in human history, hybridized with a spicy grilled cheese. Thank GOD this sandwich is so complicated to make, because if it was easy, I’d weigh about a thousand pounds right now. I’m drooling just typing about it.

What’s more of a quintessential American dish than macaroni and cheese, huh? The elbow macaroni shape was “discovered” by Thomas Jefferson during a trip to France and Italy, and he brought it back to the US. A chef of his served a cheesy macaroni “pie” at a White House state dinner in 1802, and thus mac and cheese became an American institution. We knew we had to put a mac ‘n’ cheese on the Americana menu, because it’s easily one of our personal favorites…but Jennie and I have each had trouble finding a mac and cheese in Dallas that we truly love. So we decided FRANK would have to introduce one. We went with the elbow shape out of respect to tradition, though I think we both prefer other shapes for the penultimate mac and cheese. Our sauce was made of a combination of cheese, mostly young cheddars and Monterey Jack, with some very sharp, 3-year aged cheddar from Vermont thrown in for punch. Then we folded in Hatch green chiles…an omnipresent seasonal ingredient in the Southwest during summer and early fall. And, of course, some crispy, smoked pork jowl…because everything is better with pig in it.

Maker's Mark mint julep sorbet. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Casey.

Two very rich courses have gone by, and we needed to give our diner’s palates a break before the main attraction, so it was time for a sorbet. We’ve been doing “boozy” sorbets at FRANK of late, and our diners love them. There are tons of classic American cocktails, but the first one that came to our minds was the mint julep. No one is certain who invented this combination of bourbon, mint, and lemon…but its reputation reigns supreme in the South, where it has become the official cocktail of the Kentucky Derby. We made ours with reduced Maker’s Mark, fresh mint and lemon, frozen until frosty, served with a grating of lime zest. Very refreshing and crisp…just the thing to reset the palate for the main course.

Choosing the main wasn’t easy. At all. How many classic American dishes are there? Fried chicken? Pot roast? Pork chops? Roast chicken? Hamburger? Chili? Sloppy Joe? Chicken pot pie? Barbecue? Beef stew? Any of a dozen casseroles? We kept coming back to meatloaf. Not because we love meatloaf. Personally, I hate meatloaf. Jennie isn’t that fond of it either. The sallow, under-seasoned church potluck meatloaves we grew up with were wretched, filled with undercooked, oversized chunks of green bell pepper and smothered in ultra-sweet Heinz 57 ketchup…I literally gag thinking about it. But what IS meatloaf? It’s a giant sausage. And sausage is mankind’s most delicious invention. So there was a LOT of untapped potential there, and we were determined to create a meatloaf that would utterly blow people’s mind. We both decided that bison was the best choice to start. Meaty, flavorful, and absolutely American. But bison is incredibly lean, so we supplemented it with pork to keep it juicy and tender. Tons of aromatic veggies and spices to pack in the flavor. Seared on both sides for plenty of crust. And then a housemade ketchup with a base of blueberry moonshine (another American classic) to top it all off. And you can’t serve meatloaf with potato salad. While the Germans may have invented potato salad, we definitely perfected it in the US, and ours was chock full of crunchy veggies, including green beans, which our diners found to be unexpectedly delicious.

If we thought it was gonna be hard picking the main course, it was even harder settling on dessert. Apple pie? Pecan pie? Pumpkin pie? Peach cobbler? Cherry cobbler? Tapioca pudding? Cheesecake? Chocolate chip cookies? Moon pie? Carrot cake? Doughnut? Brownie? We couldn’t decide, so we actually picked TWO desserts, both very American: Key Lime Pie, and the iconic Twinkie. Key Lime Pie was invented in the Florida keys in the early 1900s, when the Keys were still similar to the Wild West…undeveloped, rugged, and frontier. Because there was no electricity, the only dairy they could effectively use (unless they had their own goats) was canned milk. The quick combination of canned milk and juice from their easily available Key limes produced a luscious pie that has become an American favorite.

The Twinkie was invented in 1930 by a baker at the Continental Bakery, just south of present-day O’Hare airport in Chicago. Originally it was filled with banana cream, but during World War II, there was a banana shortage, so they switched to vanilla cream, and later, vanilla “creme.” Whatever that is. Nevertheless, the Twinkie became as iconic an American pastry as the donut, and the rest was history until 2012, when the Twinkie REALLY became history with the bankruptcy of Hostess. “Luckily,” the recipe and brand was licensed by two private equity firms, and the snack cakes are back in the grocery store. (Incidentally, there are many urban legends about the Twinkie’s astronomical shelf life. This is nothing more than a legend. For decades, the shelf life was officially 26 days, but with the new manufacturer, it is now officially 45 days.)

Making Twinkies is no walk-in-the-park. We tested many sponge cake recipes before we found one that wouldn’t shrink up after baking, and would allow us to easily pipe in our fresh banana cream…made using my Meemaw’s banana cream pie recipe. The dessert was a big hit, and started a trend of plating two separate desserts at FRANK which has sporadically continued since.

Overall, I have to say that this was one of my favorite FRANK menus to date. The food was so familiar to me…things I grew up with, but made even more yummy and creative. Feel free to comment below, and subscribe to my blog near the upper right corner of your screen for lots more yumminess!

Since almost the first day FRANK opened, nearly 3 years ago, we have wanted to do a theme centered around poisonous foods. Why? Because SO MANY of the foods we eat are poisonous! Either if prepared or harvested improperly, or if eaten in too great a quantity. Some poisonous foods we appreciate SPECIFICALLY for their poisonous qualities. (Why do you love the nasal attack of horseradish, or the intense burn of habanero peppers? Both are poisons designed to repel predators, yet we love them because of the pain they inflict upon us.)

I am loath to give up Halloween for any reason. It’s my favorite holiday, and I usually spend it scaring the crap out of kids in my neighorhood…a much-loved pastime. But this year when Jennie proposed we do FRANK on Halloween and finally do that Poison menu we’ve been tossing around, I figured it was time.

We had been keeping a list of poisonous foods we’d like to incorporate on the menu for a long time, and the list was far too long to use all of them. But we settled on the following. All these ingredients are either poisonous themselves, or come from plants or animals that have poisonous parts:

Our friend Stephanie Casey, who has a cool blog called Real Fine Food, came to FRANK on Halloween night to photograph the meal live and blitz it to our Facebook page, so most of the images you’ll see on this page were taken by her. We’re so busy cooking and plating and serving and educating our guests that we scarcely have time to take photos, so thanks, Stephanie, for helping out!

We welcomed our guests with a champagne cocktail…champagne, of course, containing alcohol, which everyone knows is poisonous. However, we added a little extra something into the champagne to make it EXTRA toxic! Elderflower liqueur. Elderflowers come from the elderberry plant, which is a big shrubby bush famous for both its flowers and its fruit. Every part of the elderberry plant contains toxic levels of cyanide EXCEPT for the flowers. Once the flowers have turned into berries, the berries themselves are poisonous…however, cyanide breaks down in the presence of heat, or through the process of fermentation. Which is why you can safely drink elderberry wine or jam. The flowers, however, are pristine and safe and are often made into popular beverages in Europe and other parts of the world. Incidentally, elderberry has been shown in several lab tests to be highly effective against several virulent strains of influenza! I’m not sure if our cocktail would cure the flu, but it was ghoulishly delicious!

Champagne and Elderflower Liqueur, photo courtesy of Stephanie Casey

The chlorophyll produced when a potato is exposed to light is an indication that it has also produced toxic solanine

Next up was the welcome bite, or amuse bouche, which was a housemade green potato chip with black garlic, creme fraiche, and microbasil. Potatoes are a member of the nightshade family, just like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, etc. Virtually ALL nightshades are poisonous, but the edible nightshades only have poisonous leaves, stems, and roots. They produce a toxin called solanine that is intended to keep predators from eating the growing parts of the plant, instead offering their tempting, poison-free fruit so that its seeds will be carried away to perpetuate itself. This is why you can’t safely eat raw tomato or potato leaves…but the fruit is just fine. Potatoes aren’t technically fruit, they’re a tuber and live below the ground with the roots. So they are safe to eat. However…if a potato gets unearthed and lays on top of the soil, exposed to sunlight, it begins an internal process to change itself into a full-blown potato vine. Two things happen immediately: it begins to produce chlorophyll beneath its skin (that green substance that gives leaves their color), and it begins to produce solanine (that poison that will prevent a passing animal from eating it, so it can fulfill its job of perpetuating life). Ever seen a green-skinned potato in the grocery store, or pulled a green chip out of a bag? This is a poisonous potato! Luckily, solanine breaks down in the presence of heat, just like cyanide does, so green potatoes can be made safe by cooking. (Though the solanine, if it has built up to a high level, can result in a bitter taste, even after cooking.) We intentionally exposed our potatoes to sunlight for a week to develop the color, then we fried them to make them safe to eat.

Yours, truly, with a handful of black garlic cloves

We topped the chips with black garlic, which is just ordinary garlic that has been fermented for a month or longer at high temperatures (above 90F), so that all the complex sugars in the garlic break down into potently flavorful compounds that also turn the garlic clove jet black. Black garlic is like nothing you’ve EVER tasted before. Pungent, incredibly sweet, dark, and so complex your brain will go crazy trying to decipher it. Like garlic, it is poisonous in massive quantities, but we’ll discuss that when we get to the soup course! These little bites were very popular, some folks came around begging for a second…or third!

Wild mustard, growing a few blocks from my house in the Dallas suburbs

For our salad course, we started with a base of baby and wild greens. The baby greens were grown by our friend Tom Spicer of Spiceman’s FM 1410, who purveys incredible greens, herbs, and wild ingredients like foraged mushrooms. He sells to the public, and if you’ve never been by his place near Lower Greenville, you’ve missed out on a Dallas institution. The wild greens we foraged near my house in Lewisville…I stumbled across a prolific patch of wild mustard growing in an empty lot next to a subdivision, and I foraged the leaves and flowers. Mustard contains a compound called erucic acid, which is the irritant that makes the back of your nose burn when you eat mustard greens or prepared mustard. (Same compound in horseradish and wasabi.) This acid is also used to make chemical-grade weapons and mustard gas! So it’s definitely poisonous. However, like many toxic foods, we enjoy them specifically for their poisonous qualities. Mustard is one of the most common weeds around North America…it grows wild everywhere, it’s delicious, and it’s incredibly good for you. In moderation, of course! Most people cook mustard greens, but I also love them raw, and they really jazz up a salad.

Rhubarb and its toxic leaves

The dressing for the salad was a rhubarb and tangerine vinaigrette. Most folks know that rhubarb is poisonous. The plant contains a toxin called oxalic acid, that has a very tart flavor (like all acids!) and can be deadly in enough quantity. Oxalic acid is concentrated in the leaves of the rhubarb plant, which means the stem is safe to eat either raw or cooked, but you must always trim away and discard the leaves. (You’d have to eat 20-30 pounds of leaves in a sitting to kill yourself, which isn’t likely.) Rhubarb stems are still high in other acids, which explains why they are so tart, and they make a fabulous dressing.

The greens were topped with a crumble of cassava, which is a root that is commonly eaten all around the world. It goes by many names, some of which you’ll be familiar with: manioc, yuca, tapioca, casabe… And it’s deadly poisonous. At least before being treated to remove the lethal levels of cyanide that exist in the root. Many cattle are killed each year by eating unearthed cassava roots. But, as we’ve mentioned, cyanide breaks down when you heat it or ferment it, or even dehydrate it. So cassava root can be made safely edible by a number of means, and it is an incredibly important source of nutrients for many people in the developing world. As a side note, in the US it’s very common to eat at Latin or Central American restaurants and see “Yucca” on the menu. This is a misspelling that has led many Americans to think that the spiny desert plant that is very common as an ornamental in this country, called Yucca, to be the source of the delicious, fluffy root that makes such incredible fries. Not so! The root of the yucca plant is too fibrous to eat. Those menus are misspelled, you’re actually eating Yuca, or Cassava, which you can see in this photo looks nothing like spiny yucca plants!

Eggplants come in so many amazing varieties!

Beneath the salad was a bed of pickled eggplant. Eggplants are in the nightshade family but the fruit is safe to eat. In the old days, though, eggplant was very bitter and had to be salted to extract the liquids from its spongy fruit, which contained solanine. Modern eggplants have been selectively bred to reduce the amount of solanine in the fruit, so we can safely eat eggplant raw…though I’m not sure why you’d want to! Pickled eggplant is very popular in Italy, but is almost unheard of here. Chef Adrien decided to prepare it this way to surprise our guests, and even those who typically hate eggplant devoured it pickled! While most grocery stores carry only one, maybe two, types of eggplant, there are many dozens of varieties, some of which are red, white, even striped and speckled.

The star of the plate, though…was a frog leg. Frogs and toads are poisonous creatures. Ever seen your dog try to eat a toad, and then spit it back out and stick his tongue in the air repeatedly? Virtually all frogs and toads have glands in their skin that produce toxic alkaloids to protect themselves from predators. Some species are deadly to humans even in very small amounts. The golden dart frog of Colombia is one of the most deadly creatures on the planet! Luckily, the poison remains entirely in the skin, and the meat beneath is delectable. Lots of our diners had never eaten frog and were very nervous about it, but I encouraged everyone to taste just a bite. And not a single frog leg came back uneaten out of 7 dinners! Frog is DELICIOUS, especially the way Chef Adrien prepared it…brined in a heavily spiced buttermilk for 4 hours, then pan seared to crisp, perched on a puree of red bell pepper (also a nightshade) and blanched garlic. It won quite a few votes as favorite course, especially from people who had never eaten frog before.

During prep at FRANK we play a game called “Either/Or.” Bob Dylan or Neil Young? Beer or Wine? Seattle or Portland? Potato and Leek or Potato and Chive? That last one got us all arguing about whether the flavors of leek or chive are a better match for potato. So when conceiving our soup, there was considerable consternation about whether it should be potato leek, or potato chive. Eventually we all compromised and did both! All members of the allium family (garlic, onions, leeks, etc.) contain a compound called allicin, which in moderate doses is incredibly good for us. It lowers our blood pressure and cholesterol. It has anti-cancer properties. But in extremely high doses, allicin can actually cause genetic mutation, which is of concern for cancer and reproduction. This discovery was made in 2003 and published by the National Institute of Health. So the moral of the story is…eat lots of garlic, but don’t eat pounds of it raw every day!

Our soup was a major hit…a base stock made from smoked pork hocks, with golden potatoes, tons of caramelized leeks, chives, a liberal dose of white pepper, and enriched with housemade buttermilk. We finished it with dry-cured country ham, crispy fried leeks, and a poisonous puree of tomato leaves! Remember that tomatoes are a nightshade so the green parts of the plant contain the toxin solanine. However, as we know, solanine breaks down when cooked, so if you blanch tomato leaves, you make them safe to eat! It’s sad to me that more chefs don’t cook with tomato leaves, they have SUCH a pungent, bright, astringent flavor that’s totally tomato in one moment, and totally something else in the next. If you grow tomatoes at home, try picking a handful of leaves and adding them to your tomato sauce as it simmers. (It will BLOW your mind!)

Wormwood, or artemisia absinthum, which gives absinthe both its name and hallucinogenic compound

For the sorbet course, we all knew immediately what we’d have to do. Absinthe! For those who aren’t familiar with absinthe, it’s a very old type of liqueur that, in its traditional form, contains an extraction of the plant wormwood, or artemesia absinthum…from which the liquor takes its name. Wormwood was used for millenia by primitive cultures to cleanse their bodies of parasites, because the plant contains a toxin called thujone. Overdosing on thujone causes potent hallucinations, so the plant was deliberately used as a drug starting in ancient Greece, and became very popular in France and Switzerland in the 1800s. Much loved by creative folks, absinthe was known as “the poet’s third eye” and was celebrated by such artistic powerhouses as Rimbaud, Degas, Hemingway, Wilde, and Van Gogh. The tricky part about drinking an alcohol that contains an additional poison, though, is in controlling the dosage…and excessive alcohol consumption can remove that internal self-protection instinct we have, so absinthe (and thus thujone) overdoses were very common. In higher doses, thujone causes temporary insanity. Van Gogh cut off his own ear during an absinthe-induced fit of madness. And in high enough doses, thujone causes death. This is why absinthe was banned by virtually every developed nation in the world in the early 1900s, and remains banned, in its traditional form, even today. Yes, I know you can go to the liquor store and buy a bottle of something labeled “absinthe.” But it’s not real. By law, absinthe in the US cannot contain any traceable amount of thujone…meaning it cannot be made with wormwood, or artemisia absinthum, which is the very plant that gives the liquor its name. So buy and drink all the absinthe you want…you’ll never see the mythical green fairy, or feel the need to cut off your ear. Luckily, someone in the FRANK team has been making real absinthe at home for a decade, so our diners were actually able to taste true, authentic absinthe, for what may be the only time in their lives! Not enough to cause fits of madness, of course. Real absinthe is actually VERY hard to drink. Thujone is intensely bitter…and that adjective was the most common way our diners described the taste. “INTENSE!” Those who have palates that are very sensitive to bitterness typically only ate a bite or two. But the majority devoured every last bit of the sorbet, relishing the assault on their palates.

When most people think of toxic foods, they immediately think of wild mushrooms. Growing up, your mom always screamed at you when you bent down to look at a toadstool. Americans are the most fungaphobic culture on the planet. We are absolutely TERRIFIED of any mushroom that’s not in the grocery store. Which is both good and bad. Truthfully, there are only a small handful of wild mushrooms that are lethal. But eat the wrong one, and unless you get a liver transplant within 6 hours, no medicine in the world can keep you alive. So wild mushrooms should always be treated with respect. But if you accurately identify an edible wild mushroom, there’s ZERO danger in eating it. I’ve been rabidly foraging and devouring wild mushrooms for many years, and have never been made sick, because I will NOT eat a mushroom that I can’t absolutely, positively identify. If there’s any question at all, it goes in the trash. Identification comes through education, and I had a fan on my Facebook page chastise me this weekend for posting photos of myself foraging wild mushrooms, saying her friend’s daughter died of wild mushroom poisoning and I shouldn’t be promoting it. I couldn’t disagree more…education is what will PREVENT mushroom poisonings. When we stay in the dark about it, we don’t have the knowledge to know what is safe and what isn’t. So if you’re interested in wild mushrooms, join a local mycology club, or get yourself a box full of mushroom field guides, and get out there after it rains. You’ll be amazed at what you find!

We decided to feature wild mushrooms in a risotto…a classic pairing. Our risotto stock was made from dried porcini mushrooms. No one has figured out how to cultivate porcinis, which are known as King Boletes here in the US, so every porcini eaten on the planet was found in the wild by a mushroom hunter. I think that’s magical. Porcinis are dark and intense mushrooms, especially when they are dried, and our mushroom stock tasted richer and more dense than any meat stock ever could. Then we folded in 2 varieties of wild mushroom: hen of the woods and beech. Hen of the woods, known as maitake in Japan, grow all over the US in the fall at the base of oak trees after the first cool rains. They can grow to massive size, as you can see by the grin of this lucky forager who found 2 giant hens:

Many devotees of this mushroom believe it is the most delicious of all the wild mushrooms, and I have a hard time disagreeing. On top of our risotto we plated a gravy made from the reduced braising liquid from our beef, thickened with pureed mushroom stems. Insanely beefy, intensely mushroomy… I’d like an IV of it, please! And atop the gravy was a chunk of short rib…one of our favorite proteins at FRANK…from the Beeman Family Ranch here in Texas. The Beeman family have several ranches around the state and are the only American cattle ranchers that are certified by the government of Japan to raise pure-bred Akaushi beef. “Akaushi” is one of 4 breeds of cattle that can be called “Wagyu” which is a term you often see at nice restaurants. “Akaushi” just means “red cow” in Japanese, and most US ranchers have cross bred the Akaushi with our more popular cattle, like Angus, to produce what’s known as “American Wagyu.” But not the Beeman family…they have kept tight genetic restraints on their herds to ensure they are purebred Akaushi, and this beef is just extraordinary:

Akaushi Beef from Beeman Family Ranch

This is USDA Prime beef. Lots of folks don’t understand the USDA rating, but it’s all about fat. Intramuscular fat, and how evenly and liberally it’s distributed within the meat. The more fat and the more evenly distributed it is, the higher the grade. So why do we want MORE fat in our beef? It’s all about texture and flavor. Lean beef is tougher, dryer, and tastes more gamey than fatty beef, and therefore less desirable if you’re seeking out beef as a premium product. (Of course, there are MANY reasons to seek out lean, grass-fed beef…but it’s an entirely different thing, more suitable for everyday eating.) Beef like this cooks up fork tender, melts in your mouth, and is breathtakingly, offensively expensive. But totally worth it. Appropriate for a splurge. We had multiple diners say it was the best beef they had ever tasted. Two well-dined guests on separate nights compared it to Morimoto’s A-5 Wagyu beef, which, at $200 for a 4 ounce steak, means FRANK is a steal! *giggle*

We rubbed the beef with the two most popular toxic ingredients in America: chocolate and coffee. And yes…they are both poisonous. Chocolate contains a toxic alkaloid called theobromine, which is poisonous to humans in large quantities, just as it’s poisonous to dogs and cats. You’d have to eat about 80 pounds of dark chocolate to ingest enough theobromine to actually kill yourself (if you weigh around 180 pounds), but theobromine poisoning is a very real concern, particularly for the elderly. Death by Chocolate is a real thing! Coffee contains another toxic alkaloid that many of us are actually addicted to…called caffeine. In small doses, doctors tell us that caffeine is good for us, stimulating our metabolism, keeping us active, and improving our cardiovascular system. But in higher doses, it will kill you dead. Swallow a bottle of caffeine pills and if you don’t get your stomach pumped, you’ll be spending the night in the morgue. Of course, you’d have to drink 80-100 shots of espresso over a few hours to kill yourself with coffee, and I’m not sure ANYONE can handle that much! But coffee and chocolate go absolutely swimmingly with beef, and after searing our short rib to a dark crust, we braised it in red wine with coffee, cocoa, and veggies for 4 hours at low temp until it was fork tender, but still cohesive enough to not fall apart when taking it out of the pot. Then we crisped it under the broiler with more of our coffee/cocoa rub before serving it. Perched atop the beef were tiny, delicate enoki mushrooms and wild mustard flowers, and around the plate were pungent garlic blossoms…one of my favorite wild ingredients.

The almond fruit (a relative of peaches and apricots), dried and peeled back to reveal the pit, inside of which is the poisonous almond kernel...the part we eat.

Alas, we come to dessert, and we decided to revisit the chocolate/coffee pairing by making pots-de-creme, French for “cream pot.” Sort of an intermediate step between pudding and custard, these rich little suckers were made with two types of dark chocolate, Valrhona from France, and El Rey from Venezuela. As an added punch, we incorporated another toxic ingredient…spicy chiles! I love spicy chocolate, it’s such a perfect pairing… you get dark, rich, sweet, and bitter at the outset, and it finishes with a slight heat in the back of your throat. We topped the cream pots with some coarse sea salt to help contrast the sweetness of the dish. And sticking out of the top of the pot was a tuile (ie, crisp cookie) of almond and nutmeg…both very poisonous ingredients. Almonds supply the majority of the world with pharmaceutical grade cyanide. Part of the stone-fruit family like peaches and apricots, the almond kernel is lethally toxic in cyanide when raw, so even when you buy “raw” almonds in the grocery store, they have first been thoroughly steamed to break down all that cyanide! (If you crack open a peach or apricot pit, you’ll find an almond-like seed inside, which is poisonous. But simmer it in white wine for half an hour and it will infuse an almond-like flavor into the wine, as well as make it safe to eat. I did this on MasterChef, and Ramsay was a bit dubious!)

The nutmeg fruit, with the red, lacy mace visible surrounding the nutmeg seed.

Nutmeg is the seed of an evergreen fruit tree from the tropics. Upon maturity, the fruit splits open, revealing the nutmeg seed wrapped in a lacy red membrane which is ground the make the spice mace. (NOT related to mace spray.) Nutmeg contains a toxin called myristicin that, in fairly small doses, causes hallucination. It is still a traditional and popular cultural hallucinogen in Indonesia and India, and for awhile in the 70s, it was explored by the counter culture crowd here in the US. (It’s side effects are nausea, headaches and body pain, though, so it’s not a “fun” drug.) In slightly higher doses, it can cause miscarriage, so use nutmeg sparingly if you are pregnant. In high enough doses, it can kill. Luckily, nutmeg is VERY pungent, and a little goes a very long way!

And we wanted to finish the dessert with something a little daring, as well as poisonous, so we made some chocolate covered harvester ants to garnish the plate! Ants are a major source of protein in much of the developing world. They are delicious and nutritious, as well as plentiful. In America we don’t really have a culture of eating bugs, but many other cultures certainly do…even our neighbors in Mexico have an affinity for grasshoppers! I’ve eaten many insects…here I am crunching termites in Belize:

I’ve eaten all sorts of insects in my travels, and ants are among the most accessible. They are crunchy, earthy/woody, and a little bit spicy. There’s no weird texture to get around…they’re just delicious if you can get past the mental block. Ants contain formic acid, the poison that burns when an ant stings you. In the mouth, though, that just translates to a bit of a peppery flavor. We ordered our ants from Life Studies Farm in Utah, who normally sell them to supply children’s ant farms, or for people who keep lizards as pets and need to feed them. They were a bit puzzled when I asked for a thousand ants to use at my restaurant, but they sent them anyway! They arrived through the mail a day later, bustling and angry!

Live harvester ants, before the chocolate coating

To humanely dispatch the ants, they went into the freezer for an hour, then into the microwave for a minute. (One of the only things we use the microwave for at FRANK, other than warming plates.) After this, they were ready to be coated in dark chocolate!

Chocolate Covered Ants, photo courtesy of Stephanie Casey

The only legitimate recipes you’ll find on the internet for chocolate covered ants are for chocolate candies with ants on the inside, sort of like nuts. This is because it’s exhausting to make individual chocolate covered ants! But we love our diners at FRANK, so we did it for them!

The dessert was a huge hit…some of our regulars said it was the yummiest dessert they’ve had at FRANK. Some were leery of eating the ants. Some asked for extra ants. One regular said he’d eat them by the handful if they were commercially produced!

Overall, this was probably the most fun menu we’ve put out in the 2 and a half year history of FRANK. Our diners got a real kick out of eating all the poisonous foods, learning that some of their favorite foods were poisonous, and daring each other to eat frogs and ants. Many of our regulars said that, poison and bugs aside, it was the most delicious and cohesive menu they’ve had at FRANK before, which was a true honor to hear. I spent more time at the table, discussing and educating, than I’ve EVER spent at a FRANK before. It was great fun, thanks to all our brave diners!

Chefs Jennie Kelley, Adrien Nieto, and Ben Starr, plating at FRANK

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